A page in French trade union history is turning. Charles Piaget, emblematic figure of the workers’ movement at the Lip watch factory, died on Saturday at the age of 95, announced the mayor of Besançon Anne Vignot.
He “demonstrated to an entire society that the strength of the collective, an emancipatory force, is capable of shaking up clichés and restoring hope to the victims of social injustice. This man made Lip a singular human adventure,” she wrote on and which, in the 1960s, manufactured 300,000 watches per year.
Completely unprecedented post-May 1968 self-management
Fifty years ago, in 1973, the factory’s employees took control of their bankrupt factory, in a completely unprecedented episode of post-May 1968 self-management. Having joined Lip in 1946, Charles Piaget had become a figure in this extraordinary social movement.
In an interview with AFP carried out at the beginning of 2023, the former CFDT union leader dated the “triggering” of the movement to April 17, 1973: more interested in the brand than in the production tool, the Swiss shareholders filed for bankruptcy and the boss resigns. “There was no one left to lead, so it was a situation that was going to get worse,” he said. To avoid the loss of wages due to a strike, the production rate had been deliberately slowed down.
But on June 12, the provisional administrators announced the liquidation and dismissal of a thousand employees. What followed took an incredible turn: kidnapped administrators, a war chest of watches hidden around Besançon, a factory occupied by its employees, wild sales organized throughout France, bags of money transported by train to a Parisian bank. But also nights of reflection and some 200 general assemblies.
Charles Piaget spoke to AFP about this “ten days” before deciding that there was “no other solution than to manufacture, sell and pay”. “It was out of the ordinary, we wondered if it was possible,” explained the former mechanic-toolmaker, spinning the metaphor of “sailors who revolt because the captain is a bastard, but who, once masters of the boat, do not know how to read a map.
A return mark in 2015 in Besançon
Until the moment when “the line workers came to scold us sharply” saying: “But anyway, do you think it was the boss who created the quality? Do you think it was the boss who made the performance? We were the ones who did the work and we can guarantee that we will do it with quality.” “And there we got started.”
The workers managed themselves until a rehiring agreement was reached in the spring of 1974 under the leadership of Claude Neuschwander. Two years later, another bankruptcy filing and a new episode of self-management, for lack of a buyer, before the creation of a Scop in 1977, until the mid-1980s. After various adventures, the Lip factory of the time disappeared, but the brand set foot again in 2015 in Besançon, where the watches are once again assembled.
This unprecedented experience of self-management will not have saved Lip “but all the same, it was an idea that was embarrassing, a subversive idea” Charles Piaget emphasized to AFP, keeping his union spirit intact at more than 90 years old. . His death came a few months after that of Lip’s former boss Claude Neuschwander, in August.